There have been too many false dawns in the bloody history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for yesterday's meeting in Aqaba to shake decisively the pervasive pessimism and cynicism with which the region's war-weary people view the latest tentative steps towards peace. Words, only words, the man in the street will say.
We have been here before, not least in the heady days ten years ago when the Oslo process seemed to give such hope. And yet Aqaba does mark an important opportunity on the road to peace, albeit one that must be seized. Words matter. For the first faltering concrete steps to be taken, those words had to be spoken, spoken by those very leaders, and to that audience.
Israel's Prime Minister, Mr Ariel Sharon, had to commit the Israeli government to the internationally-sponsored "road-map" to Palestinian statehood. "It is in Israel's interests not to govern the Palestinian people but for the Palestinian people to govern themselves," he declared. Importantly, he accepted the Palestinian case that their state would need a contiguous territory and promised both to move to dismantle "unauthorised" settlements and to ease the daily plight of Palestinians.
The Palestinian Prime Minister, Mr Mahmoud Abbas, also made brave declarations which are crucial to taking the process forward. "We will exert our full efforts using all our resources to end the militarisation of the intifada, and we will succeed," he promised. Crucially, he made unequivocally clear his view that even attacks on Israeli settlers or troops in the Occupied Territories were no longer a legitimate means of struggle. "We repeat our renunciation and the denunciation of terrorism against the Israelis, wherever they might be," he said. His presence itself - or, rather, the absence of his predecessor, Mr Yasser Arafat - also spoke eloquently. The fury with which both men's comments have been met by extremists back home is a measure of the importance of their statements.
Then there was President Bush, whose presence signalled concretely the long-hoped for US engagement in the process. The US is crucial as an interlocutor with Israel, able to provide the guarantees of security that its most reliable ally in the Middle East needs to make concessions. It has yet to convince Palestinians it can be a guarantor of their march to statehood, but Mr Bush announced he had appointed Mr John Wolf, assistant Secretary of State for non-proliferation, to head a team of monitors who will co-ordinate implementation of the road map. "This mission will be charged with helping the parties to move towards peace, monitoring their progress and stating clearly who is fulfilling their responsibilities," he said. The devil will be in the detail of implementation, the road bumpy, but today, at least, we must take at face value the commitments and the will expressed at Aqaba.